Pitchfork festival expands to Paris

With the sixth annual Pitchfork Music Festival just around the corner July 15-17 in Union Park, the Chicago-based music Web site has announced it’s expanding the franchise to Europe.

Pitchfork Music Festival Paris will debut Oct. 28-29 with Pitchfork’s latest cause celebre – the introspective, falsetto-voiced artist Bon Iver (aka Justin Vernon) -- headlining and curating the lineup Oct. 29, Pitchfork announced on its Web site. Also confirmed to play at the 5,000-capacity La Grande Halle de la Villette are Jens Lekman, Wild Beasts, Cut Copy, Kathleen Edwards and Pantha du Prince, among 20 bands and “a multitude of DJs” to be announced in coming weeks.

Tickets (79.90 Euros, or about $115) are on sale at digitick.com

The festival marks the latest expansion of the Pitchfork franchise, which began as a bedroom e-zine in the mid-‘90s by founder Ryan Schreiber. He moved the label’s headquarters to Chicago in 1999, and its popularity and influence escalated with the rise of digital music and on-line search engines. In the last decade, Pitchfork’s reviews have helped build early popularity for bands such as Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene and Bon Iver.

The Pitchfork Music Festival has been a success since launching in 2006, routinely selling out 50,000 tickets annually and drawing top-level bands. The Web site also launched Pitchfork.tv in 2008 to display videos and published a book, “The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present.”